Tag and Track footage from Ipsotek. Footage from company Youtube video.

TrapWire, a company founded and run by former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers, that offers to track “suspicious” activities from surveillance video, has been spotlighted in a new Wikileaks release.

The information on Trapwire’s contracts emerged from one of the five million internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and were released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, earlier this year.

The Trapwire technology was created at Abraxas corporation, which was founded by Richard "Hollis" Helms, a former CIA agent (but not the former head of the CIA under Nixon). Abraxas spun off Trapwire into another company which still has several senior employees who once worked at the agency. They include Dan Botsch, who worked at the CIA for 11 years as a Russian and Eastern European analyst, Michael Maness, a 20 year CIA veteran who worked in counterterrorism and security operations in the Middle-East, the Balkans and Europe, and Michael K. Chang, a 12 years CIA veteran on counterterrorism operations.

The company appears to have deleted the list of senior employees from its website when the Wikileaks release occurred. But the company still promotes their prior experience: “Our professionals have led successful intelligence operations against terrorist organizations and fought on battlefields across the globe.”

Mainstream media have reacted more cautiously to the TrapWire leaks. The New York Times commented that the “reports appear to be wildly exaggerated” noting that the Homeland Security had ended trials on the technology last year “because it did not seem promising.” The company refused to comment.

“The notion that you can tag a person and let the system do the tracking is a dream come true for CCTV operators,” says Professor Sergio Velastin who is also co-founder of Ipsotek. “The system relies on the identification of a person through features, such as their appearance, which different cameras can then pick up on.”

A similar technology called Footpath, which is manufactured by Path Intelligence in the UK, tracks individuals based on the strength of their cell phone signals. The system was piloted by Forest City, a shopping mall company in the U.S. in Promenade Temecula in Temecula, California, and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia last year.

How accurate are these new video surveillance technologies? “(I)t’s extremely difficult, and probably impossible, to distinguish the one-in-a-billion terrorist from innocent people doing ordinary things like taking pictures,” Jay Stanley at American Civil Liberties Union told the New York Times. And therein lies the greatest danger.